State governments have been getting a lot more scrutiny lately for one reason: they’re not doing too well. California has become the best known example, but Ohio, New York, and Illinois lead the list of big state governments that suddenly went from obscure to major crises. The problem with that statement is at both ends – how a Depression wrecks a state budget is obvious, but the relative obscurity of this branch of government is where the real problem lies. Very few people know just what states do anymore.
Monthly Archives: July 2009
Channel 6
Perhaps late at night everything seems a little funnier. Or maybe it’s a good time to think things through as if ideas are sheep waiting to be counted. Maybe I started to really like the host, Big Wilson, and his little riffs on a cheesy electric piano. Whatever the reason, I spent a lot of time as a kid watching WCIX, Channel 6 in Miami, late at night. While it wasn’t the main idea, though, what I got was a cultural education like no other.
Jobs
As many of you know, I’ve been looking for full-time work for about a year now. The life of a consultant has been pretty good to me, but I need a lot more stability and less stress. While I have to keep looking for gigs as a grant writer, social media consultant, and web content writer (hints!) to pay the bills, the job search has been my main focus. Here are a few thoughts and observations.
Moving
Canton, Ohio, is a brick and proper kind of town that most people know for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. I was there to visit a customer who was kind enough to give one of the new products I was developing a real-world trial. That went well enough, but Canton itself was a bit of a mystery. Why is it there? What did people do that gave them the scratch to create a decent town that was aging poorly? One night I had to ask my favorite authority on these kinds of questions, which is a random person in a bar – color is always more important to me than accuracy. But in Canton, Ohio, there is only one answer to the question as to why they exist:
“Re” Words
I haven’t written about the Economic Crisis, aka Depression, for a long time. There just hasn’t been anything to add to what I said a year ago when this was starting. Thing is, if you watch local nooze you realize that at some point a complete lack of nooze is nooze in itself, and the whole lack of anything becomes worthy of comments. That goes double when you’re in the middle of a Depression and no one seems to get it.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 